DIARY
No tunneling or the deal is off
by Robert LaFrance
Somebody asked me
what kind of music I liked and I said ABR – anything but rap which of course
isn’t music but, as Red Green said: “a drum beat looking for a melody”.
What I like for
music is a lot more complicated than ABR of course. It depends on the day and
how much certain persons are picking on me. If you come by my house or my car
and hear Johnny Cash getting blue all over Folsom Prison (there ain’t no
tunnels out of there!) then you know I’m okay. If he’s singing ‘A boy named
Sue’ then I am looking for trouble. If his voice of gravel is singing: “Daddy
sang bass” then you know I’ve been trying to sing again and hurt myself.
For cheerful
tunes I like those old guys from Germany and Austria. J. S. Bach wrote all
kinds of music that sounds as if he’s at a party, and that Mozart feller wrote
as if he knew what he was doing. And then I hear later that most of these
famous composers (now decomposing) were sad and angry all their lives.
So from country
music – and my all-time favourite is Hank Williams, the REAL Hank Williams who
died on New Years Day, 1953 – to classical or baroque I usually listen to stuff
in the middle. Last evening, as I was driving down to the club, the tune that
came on the radio was k d lang singing the Leonard Cohen song “Hallelujah”.
Wow.
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Turning to
medical news, I have to say I was astounded to hear that the prestigious
(overused word but I’m using it) Center for Disease Control in Atlanta has put
out a warning for people to refrain from kissing chickens.
Google it if you
don’t believe me. The reason for this warning (that was NOT issued on April 1st)
is that if you kiss a chicken you may get salmonella.
That seems
reasonable enough, they don’t want people to get salmonella which, I
understand, has nothing to do with salmon, either Sockeye or Atlantic. I sat
with a lemonade and pondered this for a while but couldn’t come up with a
circumstance in which someone would kiss a chicken.
For the first
time in my life I was wrong. Watching the CBC news that evening, I saw that
chicken lovers (not shy teenage boys as you might expect) did indeed kiss their
pets. The Center for Disease Control reported that there were 46 cases of
salmonella last year, all traced to kissing chickens.
I’m not kidding
or lying (and I have been known to do both) about this. On my TV screen were
several people who were kissing chickens and were insisting they would continue
this practice “until the cows come home”, one of them said. They didn’t mention
what plans they had for Bossie when she comes trundling back from the brook.
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I like it when
other people do my job for me. Now if I could get them to mow my lawns.
One recent day I
went in to Perth-Andover Building Centre to buy some 25-amp house fuses and was
nonplussed to find there were no 25A ones but a whole whack of the green 30-amp
ones. Then I looked closer and found that those green fuses were in fact 25A
fuses in spite of the fact that for decades green fuses were 30A ones.
I took two of the
green ones up to the counter and asked the young lady (I won’t mention her name
but it was Paula) there why the companies had changed the colours of the fuses.
“Just to conFUSE us,” she said,
without a sign of a smile. And I thought I was a master of puns. I hereby move
back to the second row.
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Someday I’m going
to write a few things about our so-called “justice” system that will sentence
one person to three years (for example) for a certain crime, and hand out a
parole to another guy who committed the same crime in identical circumstances.
The one thing
that drags my bum down a cobblestone street is the concept of ‘concurrent
sentences’. One time that happens is when a prosecutor wants to clear a whack
of crimes from his or her books and persuades a criminal to plead guilty to all
of them in exchange for a lighter sentence. So the crook does plead guilty to
six break-ins, although he only did two, and gets sentenced to two years in
medium security. “And no tunnelling!” they tell him, “or the deal is off.”
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One final
comment: The day this column appears is August 19, which was and is my late
mother’s birthday. Born in 1906, she died in 1961, a short time before my 13th
birthday. R.I.P. Mum. -end-
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